Monero ranks #10 of 504 cryptocurrencies. On a list that also counts tokens, memecoins, wrapped coins, staked derivatives and stablecoins it appears at #13: 3 of the 12 assets ahead of it are not native coins but tokens or claims. A token is issued on a host blockchain rather than running its own; a claim stands for an asset already counted. Of the 4 non-native assets CoinSpectrum lists above it by market cap, all are claims on other assets.
| CoinSpectrum Grade | A+ · 87/100 · provisional |
|---|---|
| Rank among cryptocurrencies | #10 |
| Rank counting claims | #13 |
| Market capitalisation | $11.4B |
| Price | $603.35 |
| Circulating supply | 18,823,610 XMR |
| Maximum supply | no fixed cap |
| Consensus family | Proof of Work |
| Consensus mechanism | RandomX (CPU) |
| Own hashrate | 6.43 GH/s |
| Network purpose | Private payments |
| Ledger type | Single-asset ledger |
| Launch distribution | No premine |
Market figures from the 28 October 2026 build. Open the live view for every exchange's price, and charts.
A+ — 87 out of 100, provisional (from 19 of 20 criteria, 28 October 2026 build). With what is not yet measured anywhere from nothing to full marks, the score would be 83 to 88 (A+ to A+).
| Criterion | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Leading Consensus Mechanisms (Source) | 10 | group average |
| Consensus: leader ladder | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of consensus families ranked by their largest chain's market cap |
| Consensus: family ladder | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of families ranked by the combined market cap of their chains |
| Cryptocurrency Standards (Source) | 8.5 | group average, 12 of 13 measured |
| Sound Money Qualities (6 checks) | 7.5 | 4.5 of 6 points source |
| Scarcity: a fixed cap that holds, and a supply near 21 million | 5 | no fixed maximum; 18.8 million in circulation: supply scale 9.9, cap 0 |
| Durability: five years or more with no halt, freeze or reversal | ✓ | 12 full years since its first recorded price, no halt, freeze or reversal in five years |
| Fungibility: every unit interchangeable, none the protocol can freeze or set apart | ✓ | no authority can freeze, blacklist or set apart a coin |
| Divisibility: the smallest unit worth a cent or less | ✓ | 12 decimal places, the smallest unit worth $6.0e-10 |
| Portability: fees of a cent or less and capacity for real demand | ✗ | typical fee $0.019; about 3 transactions a second (0 on the throughput scale; 5 is the busiest networks' median demand) |
| Verifiability: open-source nodes and checking without a trusted server | ✓ | node software open source; pruned nodes validate everything |
| Privacy (5 checks) | 10 | 5 of 5 passed source |
| Whitepaper privacy: keys are not tied to an identity | ✓ | Anyone can create keys and receive and send coins; the protocol carries no identity check. |
| UTXO ledger: a new key for each payment, no account linking every coin | ✓ | |
| Network-level privacy: the node hides where a transaction came from (Dandelion++, Tor or I2P, on by default) | ✓ | monerod relays transactions by Dandelion++ stem/fluff by default (v0.16, 2020). |
| Hidden amounts (confidential transactions, RingCT, shielded pools, Mimblewimble) | ✓ | RingCT (Jan 2017) hides all amounts, mandatory. |
| Hidden sender and receiver (ring signatures or zero-knowledge proofs, one-time or stealth addresses) | ✓ | Ring signatures hide the sender and one-time stealth addresses hide the receiver, mandatory. |
| Scalability (fees, throughput, block time, block space, features) | 4.5 | average of 5 parts source |
| Fees ($0.001 or less 10, $1 or more 0) | 5.7 | typical fee $0.019 |
| Throughput (2,478 a second, the busiest network's peak day, 10; 119, the median of the ten busiest, 5) | 0 | about 3.3 simple transactions a second |
| Block time (10 minutes 10, less either side) | 7.5 | a block every 2 minutes |
| Block space per 10 minutes (32 MB or more 10) | 5.9 | 0.6 MB limit, 3 MB per 10 minutes |
| Features (3 checks) | 3.3 | 1 of 3 passed |
| Payments safe to accept within seconds | ✗ | Two-minute blocks with a 10-block spend lock; zero-confirmation acceptance is not protected by the network. |
| Pruned nodes: a full node can validate and drop old history | ✓ | Monero v0.14 (2019): --prune-blockchain drops 7/8 of ring-signature data while still validating. |
| Light clients verify payments from headers or proofs, without a trusted server | ✗ | No SPV-style light client; light wallets trust a remote node or server. |
| Security (miner pay and 7 checks) | 7.2 | 7.2 of 9 points source |
| Miners paid a day ($1,000 0, $10 million or more 10), 2 points | 6.1 | about $266,958 a day |
| Its own hashrate: at least half its algorithm's largest, not merge-mined | ✓ | |
| Largest pool or validator under 50% | ✓ | 26.7% |
| Largest three under 75% | ✓ | 59.9% |
| More than one maintained client | ✓ | 2 |
| Node software is open source | ✓ | Volunteer and community-funded contributors maintain monerod in the monero-project repository; the separate Cuprate team builds a second node. |
| Real on-chain use: 1,000+ transactions a day | ✓ | about 28,006 a day |
| No 51% attack or deep reorganisation in five years | ✗ | 2025-09-14: 18-block reorganisation from height 3,499,659 orphaned ~118 transactions; attributed by observers to withheld blocks from the Qubic mining pool, which had claimed majority hashrate in August 2025. |
| Programmability (tokens, contracts, 5 checks) | 2.2 | 2 of 9 points source |
| Token issuance | 0 | No token issuance on the chain itself |
| Smart contracts | 0 | No scripting; transactions are fixed RingCT transfers. |
| Multisig and time locks | ✓ | M-of-N multisig by key splitting (experimental, CLI) and the consensus unlock_time field (absolute height or timestamp), slated for deprecation with FCMP++, which has not reached mainnet as of October 2026. |
| Atomic swaps with other chains | ✓ | Adaptor-signature BTC-XMR swaps with a working implementation (COMIT's xmr-btc-swap, now eigenwallet). |
| An exchange built into the protocol | ✗ | No exchange in the protocol; eigenwallet is off-chain software. |
| Cross-chain messaging the chain verifies itself | ✗ | No protocol messaging to other chains. |
| Non-fungible tokens | ✗ | Monero carries only XMR; no token type. |
| Decentralisation | 10 | section average, 7 of 8 measured |
| Censorship resistant (Source) | 10 | No authority can halt the chain or freeze funds: No party can freeze or reverse coins; amounts and owners are hidden by design. source |
| No central team (Source) | 10 | No central team: Volunteer and community-funded contributors maintain monerod in the monero-project repository; the separate Cuprate team builds a second node. source |
| Who can mint (Source) | 10 | Proof of work: 10 of 10 on the ladder of who produces blocks |
| Nodes (Source) | 10 | 4,984 reachable nodes (source: MoneroHash) |
| Holder concentration (Source) | — | Not yet measured |
| Premine (allocated at launch) | 10 | Fair launch: no premine |
| Fundraising | 10 | No sale of the coin |
| Developer share (after launch) | 10 | No developer share: every new coin goes to the miners who produce blocks |
| Supply & Demand | 8.9 | group average |
| Supply & Demand (Source) | 7.9 | average of 6 measures |
| Exchanges (10 or more: 10) | 10 | 17 exchanges |
| Daily volume ($10K 0, $1B or more 10) | 8 | $131,910,904 traded in 24 hours; #32 by volume on the exchanges the site reads (scored on the median day of the last 30, $101,667,640) |
| Turnover (volume ÷ market cap, 5% a day: 10) | 6.2 | 0.97% of its market cap a day, median of the last 30 days |
| Order-book depth (bids and asks within 2% ÷ market cap, 1%: 10) | 4.7 | $2,861,728 within 2% of the price on 3 exchanges, 0.03% of its market cap, median of the last 2 days; a lower bound: the books returned by 1 of them stop short of 2% |
| Market cap ($1M 0, $10B or more 10) | 10 | $11B, at the top of the scale |
| Paper trading (futures, options and margin ÷ market cap, 0%: 10, 100%: 0) | 8.5 | futures, options and margin positions 2.4% of its market cap |
| Supply (smaller is better) | 9.9 | no fixed maximum; 18.8 million in circulation |
| Record | 9 | group average |
| Record (origin, claims, halts) | 10 | 3 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive record | ||
| Launched with a stated purpose, not as a joke | ✓ | |
| No claims by its founders that contradict its own design | ✓ | |
| No halt, freeze or reversal in five years | ✓ | |
| Age (years since genesis) (Source) | 10 | 12 full years since 2014-05-19, the first day with a recorded price (genesis not yet researched, so the age can only be understated). |
| Development (work, improvements, unfixed issues) | 7 | 2 positive, 0 negative source |
| Positive | ||
| Steady work, 6 of 6 | ✓ | 965 commits in 12 of the last 12 months (github.com/monero-project/monero); monero v0.18.5.4, 17 Oct 2026; 11 releases in the last 24 months. |
| Shipped a security fix in two years, +1 | ✓ | Monero 0.18.4.0, Apr 2025: fixed multiple daemon network vulnerabilities. |
Twenty criteria, weighted equally. The Cryptocurrency Standards have six sections: sound money qualities (six checks: scarcity, durability, fungibility, divisibility, portability, verifiability), privacy (five checks), scalability (four measures and three features), security (miner pay and seven checks), programmability (token issuance, smart contracts and five checks) and decentralisation (censorship resistance, no central team, who can mint, nodes, holders, premine, fundraising and developer share). Provisional: criteria marked — are not yet measured and are left out of the average. A rating of structure and market depth, not a price forecast or investment advice. How the grade is built · Highest-graded cryptocurrencies.
18,823,610 XMR are in circulation, against no fixed cap — issuance has no defined end.
| Nodes or validators | 4,984 |
|---|
Monero is secured by 6.43 GH/s of its own work. Hashrate does not compare across algorithms — a SHA-256 hash and a Scrypt hash cost different amounts to produce.
No SEC/CFTC determination — unclassified.
The regulator's position, reported as stated, not CoinSpectrum's. Assets nobody has ruled on are left unclassified rather than sorted by a guess.
Monero is #10 among cryptocurrencies and #13 in the market ranking, which lists wrapped coins, staked derivatives, stablecoins and tokens alongside them. CoinSpectrum counts an asset once, and counts only cryptocurrencies: assets with their own blockchain and their own consensus. A wrapped coin, a staked derivative or a stablecoin is a claim on something already counted; a token, memecoin or otherwise, runs on another chain's blocks. All of them are listed, each in its own section, and none is added to the total. The 3 places between Monero's two ranks are held by claims and tokens, not by other networks. The methodology sets out the rule and the counting rule argues for it.
The price above is the median of the exchanges the site reads live, checked every minute and cross-checked against a market snapshot (how market data is gathered). The grade is scored on published criteria, each with its source (the method). The site is independent, nothing on it is a paid placement, and its statements are signed (about CoinSpectrum, the manifesto).